If you’ve read my previous articles you’ll recognize the title of this post. For those of you who are new, these are my thoughts behind the themes I’ve designed. This time, I’d like to talk about Forefront — a responsive Business theme.

I mentioned this in my previous post about the Further theme, Behind the Design of the Further Theme, too that I strongly believe that we, as WordPress theme designers, should create amazing themes for specific purposes/audiences rather than multi-purpose themes that are just good. In many cases, themes designed for a specific purpose or a targeted audience perform better when people use them for that purpose. I’ve created Ryu specifically for the Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter generation of personal bloggers.

Recently, I released Further — Automattic’s first premium magazine theme. I’ve been given a chance to write about my thoughts behind its inspiration, design, and development. I hope this gives you something to think about as you design your next WordPress theme or website.

If you’ve just started a WordPress blog, you may not want to invest money in premium themes. Don’t worry, there are nice looking, free, and responsive themes in the Official Directory! I’ve picked ten themes that help to get your newly created blog up and running quickly.

Recently, Ian Stewart was a special guest on the podcast by Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert, ShopTalk. Ian discussed many web topics, including WordPress (obviously!) and answered questions from listeners.

We are obviously theme junkies here and everyday we check the official free theme directory. It’s only March now but many free themes have already became available since the new year. To highlight the great themes there I picked up ten themes added in 2012 that are not only coded well but look beautiful.

Like last year, 2012 has been and is going to be another great year for WordPress themes. Huzzah!

Have you checked the character map for the web font you use in your WordPress theme?

Thanks to all web fonts, nowadays we have much more choices for fonts in our WordPress themes. You might have checked if your theme looks good with Lorem Ipusum text but I’m afraid that’s not good enough. Lorem Ipusum text doesn’t have all digits, punctuations, and symbols from the Basic Latin character set. A WordPress theme should support at least all the Basic Latin characters, and this is only assuming your theme will be used for English language. This seems to be basic but often it’s overlooked. Continue reading →